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Best CMS for Directory Site

I'm about to start developing a directory website that could potentially be quite large in terms of number of entries.

I'm interested to know, in your experience, which of the two most popular CMS systems - Drupal or Joomla, would be a better fit for this task?

Some of the specs, issues are:

- The database is expected to handle 10s of 1000s of entries/rows so speed
of access to the information is key
- The site will need to have a blog and community/forum similar to this one
- Development will be outsourced but I will maintain the site once built; and
while I have familiarity with PHP and mySQL, the chosen CMS needs to be
simple enough for an amateur like me to be able to create and edit any
content pages on the fly

So to sum up, it's about speed of directory traversal, plus ease of creation and maintenance of basic content pages. There won't be any user-generated content (apart from forum postings).

If you've built a directory site in either Drupal or Joomla or both I'd love to hear about your experiences with the systems; though of course general comments on the CMSs are welcome too.

I've done quite a bit of reading on both CMS's and am aware of the argument that Drupal is much more flexible but harder to use whereas Joomla is less secure, slower but quicker to learn.

At the moment I'm inclined to go with Joomla just depending on how much 'slower' it might be in terms of accessing the content for my directory in the back end and how easy it is to create and maintain new pages....

Try ocPortal

I believe for what you are wanting to do the catalogues feature (which comes as standard) in ocPortal will be perfect for you want to do, there is also a blog and forum standard feature without needing third party addons.

Joomla is definitely the way to go with directory sites...

Agreed Joomla is the only way to go. I have a few directory sites - all done in Joomla and I'm very happy with the decision.

Its free, easy to install (I have hostgator, which makes it easy – don’t know about other hosting co’s) easy to set up ads, and they have some good directory plugins. Joomgalaxy is the one I use – great so far but they don't have multi directory yet, I emailed them and apparently they are working on it though.

Have you considered WordPress its the simplest of the 3 and you can you can easily manage the site, and you have so many videos and WordPress help sites. Plus you have so many web tools that can really help you increase the functionality of your site.